And, speaking of data points, . . .
I recently acquired an extended-life battery for my Palm Treo 700p. I'm purposely running down the battery today so that I can give it, in effect, a deep charge, in hopes of getting good battery life for quite some time to come. [Please note: as I was reminded by others, this tactic is emphatically stated to be unnecessary for the type of battery in my phone and iPod, and can cause damage if pushed too far.] Today I took note of the time I started using the phone connection, and this is what I found: using Bluetooth to connect to the phone from my laptop, and using the phone to connect to my ISP, I got about four hours and forty-five minutes of connectivity before the phone turned off it's Bluetooth radio.
After resetting the phone, I'm getting a few more minutes of connectivity, just enough to write and post this missive.
I believe that a judicious user could eke nearly an entire work day out of this much juice, if you were careful to connect and disconnect, rather than staying connected for an entire morning.
An obvious question is "Why?" If you are away from a power source, and your laptop is running on its own battery, I believe that it will draw less power to connect this way than to connect with a USB cable, by which the phone would continuously recharge itself.
You could probably gain more time by setting the phone's display to turn off more quickly. Mine is set to the maximum of 3 minutes. In addition, I believe that being in a strong signal area would use less power. From this location, I'm getting only one or two bars of Verizon signal strength, which is probably causing the phone to transmit a stronger signal. But that's really just a guess on my part.
After resetting the phone, I'm getting a few more minutes of connectivity, just enough to write and post this missive.
I believe that a judicious user could eke nearly an entire work day out of this much juice, if you were careful to connect and disconnect, rather than staying connected for an entire morning.
An obvious question is "Why?" If you are away from a power source, and your laptop is running on its own battery, I believe that it will draw less power to connect this way than to connect with a USB cable, by which the phone would continuously recharge itself.
You could probably gain more time by setting the phone's display to turn off more quickly. Mine is set to the maximum of 3 minutes. In addition, I believe that being in a strong signal area would use less power. From this location, I'm getting only one or two bars of Verizon signal strength, which is probably causing the phone to transmit a stronger signal. But that's really just a guess on my part.
posted by Daniel | 2:45 PM
2 Comments:
BTW, from what I can tell, the Palm 700p battery is a Lithium-Ion battery. Unlike Ni-Cd batteries, Li-Ion ones should never be deep cycled like you describe. Doing so can risk depleting the battery so much that it will not recharge. I ran into this problem with the battery in my MacBook while coming back from Spain over Christmas. I watched a DVD on the flight into the US and then couldn't find a plug to recharge a bit while on a layover in Chicago. By the time I got back to NC the battery voltage had dropped so low that it wouldn't recharge at all and I ended up having to have the battery replaced.
You can find more information about this at these links:
Wikipedia article
Useful link from the wikipedia article
Excellent update, Tanner. Thanks for the explanation and anecdote. I noticed in the BatteryUniversity page that the circuitry which tracks the battery's charge level can be recalibrated by running the battery down to its designated cut-off point, but one would want to immediately recharge the battery from that point, rather than leaving it to continue draining, as happened with your laptop battery. I see that my iPod also uses this type of battery, as does my laptop. I appreciate your writing with the heads-up.
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home